DOOM 3

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Scared of the dark? If you're not now, you will be after playing this sensationally atmospheric FPS.

By Douglass C. Perry

With developers taking their design cues from Half-Life and Halo in the past few years, it's curious to see id Software revert to its roots with Doom 3. The very first Doom, sitting on the shoulders of Wolfenstein 3-D, which launched the first-person shooter craze in 1993, was a simple yet brilliant game in many regards. It had no manual Y-axis, so you couldn't look up or down. Enemies cheaply popped out of hidden doorways as you passed them. Very little of the environment was interactive. And the visuals, while maybe good then, are distinctly painful to view now.

So then, why should we waste our time with the return of an old dinosaur? What can it possibly deliver that hasn't been done before? Why go backward, not forward? In a way, Doom 3 offers nothing new at all. It's much like its predecessors. The gameplay is mostly linear, there are fewer enemies on screen than in previous iterations, the environments are almost all non-interactive, and the arsenal of weapons and the cast of characters leave little to the imagination.

So, WTF? id's Doom 3 focuses on a few simple concepts and it does them extremely well. Carmack and company have created a dynamic atmosphere, laced with tension and fear, using sensational lighting and top-notch audio work. It delivers perfect controls, great interfaces, and supremely high-level production values resulting in an unparalleled presentation. It strikes at your primal instincts, perfectly playing the chords of your fight or flight feelings like a masterful classical pianist. And, even knowing its shortcomings, Doom 3 provides an enormous sense of entertainment. It's not perfect. It's not the greatest thing ever. But it is damned good. Perhaps, with the exclusive two-player online cooperative mode, it's great.

Want to see the game in motion and hear our analyses? Check our full video review.

Single-Player Campaign Arriving first on PC in fall 2004, Doom 3 was hyped and adored, criticized and flogged, but in the end the result essentially went like this: The gameplay is a little simple, perhaps a little gimmicky, but what id does with presentation, sound, and graphics is truly unreal. The same holds true for the Xbox version. Only on Xbox the effect is more profound. Few games look, feel, or sound as good as Doom 3 on Xbox. Few games offer an online cooperative mode, and few games are as scary, tense, visceral, or as engrossing as id's Doom 3.

Much like its predecessors, Doom 3 follows the story of a military and scientific experiment gone wrong. Under the guidance of the cynical mega-corp United Aerospace Corporation, future scientists on Mars have tapped into warp tunnels and unstable doorways into unknown worlds. Unwittingly, they've tapped into hell. While giving you very little story and no real answers to why, how, and what's next, id once again has slipped gamers into the boots of an unnamed soldier prepared fight the legions of hell itself. Needless to say, the story takes a back seat to the action.

Who let the dogs out?

Instead of Halo-esque cutuscenes and scripted events unraveling deeper and deeper storylines, Doom 3's beauty is its simplicity. You're a marine, and you're trained to kill anything that gets in the way of your mission. Thus, you plunder through an endless succession of dark, flickering hallways and corridors, and you learn the three basic tenets of Doom 3. A) If the new room you enter has dark spots, hellspawn is guaranteed to form there; B) Your shotgun is your best friend, keep it loaded at all times; and C) Enemies will continue to spawn behind you. Knowing these three rules helps to see the recipe of gameplay id has in store for you.

This is a game of simple strategies and, because of that, Doom 3's single-player experience is unfortunately linear, repetitive, and predictable. On the one hand this is disappointing; on the other, it's riveting. Because you play most of the game in the dark, you will constantly switch between using a flashlight (whose batteries never die, thankfully) and a weapon. Why, in the scientifically modern future, marines don't have weapons with built-in flashlights escapes me, but that's the core mechanic upon which this game is based. So erase that reasonable question from your mind, it's not relevant here.

Doom 3 is built upon hundreds of corridors, rooms, hallways, and control desks with flickering lights, secret rooms, and, sadly, almost no interactive stuff. Thus, the core gameplay rests is centered around you entering into a room, as either enemies slowly creep out of the dark, or the lights switch off and you standing there chugging lead in the dark via the light of enemy fireballs.

id's game provides a good amount of cheap enemy tricks, and the gameplay can be gimmicky. Enemies creep out of compartment doors that you've already passed and they sneak out of completely dark corners just when you think the coast is clear. The AI is also straightforward and simple. They appear, they shoot, they run full-tilt at you, and you just pull out the shotgun and blow them back to hell. Literally.

There is less platformy stuff, less jumping. Less balancing on beams over molten lava. Fewer areas requiring you to endless try to make that insane jump, or that last-ditch attack against all odds. And disappointingly, fewer areas are big, open and filled with dozens of enemies, like previous Doom iterations.